we are like this only

Yesterday I watched this movie for the second time, and was moved by it all over again. I remember when it was released last year, it got a lot of criticism from the mass audience, and probably scared KJo right back into KKKG mode all over again (help!). I think it does a good job of explaining all the things that are going on in modern marriages today, whether people want to accept it or not. I remember when I was a kid, there was one Kashmiri girl who lived in the house opposite us who was divorced. All of us kids and probably many of our moms used to be intensely curious about this strange creature - a 'divorce'. On Ran Navami, when all the girls in the neighbourhood were invited to go over for the puja and the puri-halwa, we used to keep staring at the poor girl, probably making her highly uncomfortable, because finding a divorce was such an unusual thing in a middle class neighbourhood. Today, au contraire, divorces and broken marriages are becoming more and more common a...

Human memory is such a funny thing. In the dog days of the summer, when the temperature climbs to over 42 degrees centigrade, one finds it so difficult to imagine a world which is not searingly hot, in which one can take an evening walk without getting reduced to a little grease spot on the floor, and just looking at a sweater while packing for an overseas trip is enough to bring on an attack of heat rash. During the winters, we get reverse amnesia - one can't remember a day when some body part or other was not frozen, days when we would long to eat ice straight out of the freezer. You can't look at a swimming pool without shivering, particularly during December-January which are unfortunately the only two months of real winter left in Delhi. The weather has slowly started turning cooler now. The daytime temperature is still at 36 degrees, but at night it falls to 24 and in Gurgaon, even lower. Since our bedroom is adjacent to our rooftop garden, it's all the cooler there, ...

Right after posting on railway travel, I had to do a painful Delhi-Bombay day trip yesterday. Painful because it seems to be one of Murphy's laws that if you have to get up at an unearthly hour to catch a flight, you will either end up going to bed late or get poor sleep when you do. I didn't sleep well at all, and A ( who was also going to Bombay) and I were tired and grumpy when we set out, not helped by the cabbie being late. Anyway, at the end of a long day, I was back on the flight. I hadn't carried anything to read, for a change and hadn't had time at the airport to so much as buy a magazine. The flight was packed and my knees were jammed into my armpits - or that's what it felt like - due to the limited leg space. I didn't have the inclination to contort myself and dig out my laptop to read one of the books I had downloaded. Since I'm one of those people who find it hard to sleep anywhere, I turned to the only entertainment option - looking out of the...

I visited the National Rail Museum today on work, and as always was delighted to be there. It's an amazing place with a wonderful display of trains and engines, and brought back fond memories of traveling by train. I love train journeys and always have. Every summer, when we were kids, mom, I and my sister would pack ourselves off to the south for a two month holiday, with dad typically joining in around the half way mark. Earlier, the journey used to be in the good old GT or grand Trunk Express, which used to go from Delhi to Madras, where we had a 7 hour stopover before a new engine was attached which took the train up to Bangalore. Later, of course, the KK express - Karnataka Kerala express - took over, which used to take about 2 days to get there and was considered a vast improvement. Weirdly, I always used to start my asthma attacks at Jolarpet station before we got into Bangalore, and they would last the duration, finally relieving me when we passed Jolarpet station on our wa...

I'm no expert on politics and could have possibly biased views about the purported clash of civilizations. But my ears are constantly lacerated by the mangling of the names of other countries on CNN. I know Dubya and friends like to talk about nucular devices rather than nuclear weapons. And it may not stem terrorism. But would it really be that hard for Dubya and friends, or CNN and other American media to start saying I-Raq - I as in shIp, and Raq as in 'Rock' with a southern American accent; and I-Ran - I as in shIp, and Ran as in Obi Wan Kenobi? Seriously, how would Americans like to be called Amoricans or Amreekans?

When I first found out I was having a baby I didn’t feel very much besides nausea. I had never been overly maternal or felt any ticking from the old body clock. Over the months of gestation, the nausea receded but though various worries kept manifesting themselves, I didn’t feel any special bond with the baby. I worried about that too. After my son was born, since I was woozy and passed out from the sedation, everyone else in the immediate family saw him before I did. And even when I saw him I didn’t feel what I expected – a gush of love so strong and powerful that nothing else would compare. My husband seemed to have bonded much faster than I did. Through the first couple of months of endless feeding and cleaning I guess my son and I took our first tentative steps (obviously metaphoric in his case) towards understanding each other and maybe liking. My son is six months old now. And today as I watch him, I am touched by myriad emotions. At times his air of fragility and vulnerability a...